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last beard post

On Tuesday the 23rd of January I shaved off my beard after spending 107 days growing it, see above for the final beard pic. It was an interesting experiment and it’s something that I recommend trying, but I couldn’t keep it.

Having a beard is more effort than being clean-shaven. Eating is more difficult when you are trying to keep your beard out of your food. If you get the full beard (as I did) then the mustache at the sides of your mouth will get into your food (particularly bad for ice-cream). I guess that the benefit of having a waxed mustache would be that the wax would keep it out of the way of the food – the waxed mustache wasn’t just an issue of style!

Immediately after cutting off my beard I didn’t shave for almost a week and experienced much less discomfort than I had previously experienced when not shaving for that period. I think that having been used to having a beard an amount of hair that would previously annoy me is not noticeable. Also it seems that the hair was initially softer after I cut off the beard. Maybe shaving somehow makes the hair grow tougher.

When I had the beard I thought that I hadn’t adjusted my body image to match, as every time I looked in the mirror I felt surprised to see it. Once it was gone my new look initially seemed more odd to me than my previous appearance, and it took me a number of weeks to get used to not having a beard.

When shaving off my beard I decided to do it in stages, firstly I did a “goatee” cut and then just a mustache. The mustache is a little lop-sided, but I was in a hurry and didn’t plan to keep it for long.